Carbon optimizations

Overview

Carbon optimizations is a document type in Azure Documenter that provides actionable recommendations to reduce the Azure carbon footprint of your subscriptions. It analyzes resource usage patterns and surfaces guidance on removing idle or underutilized resources, rightsizing workloads, and improving energy efficiency.

Emission scope definition

Carbon emissions are classified into three scopes, as defined by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, providing complete visibility into emissions across all stages of service delivery:

• Scope 1 — direct emissions from Azure datacenter infrastructure that supports your services, such as backup generators, facility operations, and on-site energy production.
• Scope 2 — indirect emissions from the generation of purchased electricity, steam, heating, or cooling consumed by Azure datacenter infrastructure that supports your services (for example, grid electricity used to power servers, cooling systems, and network equipment).
• Scope 3 — other indirect emissions that occur across the value chain supporting your cloud services (for example, hardware manufacturing, transportation, supply chain activities, and end-of-life treatment of equipment).

Document content

The Carbon optimizations document provides actionable recommendations to reduce carbon emissions, grouped by subscription and based on observed resource usage patterns. Recommendations cover guidance on removing idle or underutilized resources, rightsizing workloads, and improving energy efficiency through optimized configurations.

The document includes:

• An executive-level carbon optimization summary for Azure subscriptions
• Carbon optimization recommendations grouped by subscription

Configuration

Use the following steps to generate a Carbon optimizations document. Navigate to Azure Documenter to get started.

1. Click New configuration. The Configure your document wizard opens.
2. In Step 1 — Basics, enter a configuration name. Under Choose document type, select Carbon optimizations. Configure the Carbon emission scope — select the emission scope categories to include in the analysis (Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 are all selected by default).
3. In Step 2 — Service principal, select the service principal and configure the subscription scope. Click Next.
4. Complete Steps 3–6 (Branding, Publish settings, Schedule, Notifications) as required. Click Next after each step.
5. In Step 7 — Review, confirm your configuration and click Finish.

Once generation is complete, a URL is created for the document, and you can download it using the Download link.